Fairies and Laughter and You
by PoppieJoy
Summary: Brittany was the kind of kid who had a destination but never ever read the map. She thought things about herself that scared her so much, she learnt to feel excited by them. She knew she was different but she wasn't desperate to find out why.


Today, I got summoned into my boss's office, on the third floor of the famous restaurant, Home, downtown Santa Monica, (where ironically, I spend nearly every single day of my life), to discuss what my boss's PA liked to call, "The Big D".

It had happened to all of us, it seemed. But all with different letters of the alphabet. Mercedes had come down muttering something about "the big F", Kurt had returned debating the pros and cons of "the big C" and Quinn had managed to burn her 'burnt cream' because she was too busy flapping her wooden spoons about, yelling something like, "What does it matter if I don't think about the big 'W' of my life? It's too short to worry about such stupid questions."

I'd inevitably been next.

I'd possibly been over cautious as I stepped into Mr Schue's chaotic work space, swiping the green leather chair of dust and resisting the urge to pull my right ankle onto my left knee. He'd only have looked at me weirdly, perhaps sent a confused grunt in my direction, but I was so anxious to hear what my letter was going to be that I didn't think a roll of his eye at my masculine mannerisms where going to be entirely necessary. I'd only have given him a weirder look back and I thought it was probably nice for my facial muscles to have a break for a half hour or so.

(And you know how much they need it.)

I'd barely found a sort of comfortable secondary go-to position before Mr Schue had switched the lights off to leave us in absolute pitch darkness and flipped the blinds so there was absolutely no light coming in at all.

I literally thought that was the end of my life.

(I know you're laughing.)

(It really wasn't a laughing matter, though.)

I sat, frozen to the dusty green chair, just waiting for his hand to touch my boobs and to tell me he'd waited for this moment the whole four years I'd been working there. Strings of pathetic rejections flooded through my mind, each as quick to disappear as they were to arrive. I couldn't even tell you now what I would have said, had any of this actually happened.

Instead, Mr Schue stayed standing at the light switch, (or so I think, as I didn't hear any movement and that's where his voice came from), and asked me just one question.

"Santana," He said, sounding suspiciously wistful, "If this was your bedroom, would you be able to navigate your way to absolutely everything you kept within those four walls?"

(How the fuck do you answer that, baby?)

I must have stayed silent for at least seventeen, if not more seconds, until I finally mumbled something like, "Probably?"

"Santana," He boomed this time, his voice maybe moving a little to the left of me. "Tell me in which direction, if you were standing by your door, would your bed be?"

He sounded so interested, like my answer would solve all of the problems in the world. Because of this, the beating of my heart from this irrational pressure I was suddenly feeling could probably be heard down into the bustling kitchen below us and beyond. I had no idea what he was trying to insinuate.

"To my left?" I answered, my voice quivering and unsure.

"Is that a question?" He asked. "Because if you're asking me, I honestly wouldn't know; I've never set foot in your bedroom, Mrs Peirce-Lopez."

Well, shit.

(I couldn't help the relief that washed over me at that exact moment.)

"No, Mr Schue, my bed is definitely to my left."

"So what about your closet? Where's that?"

I grimaced. I hated that word. "To my left as well, Mr Schue."

"And what's in your closet? Anything nice? Fancy? Throw-in-the-trash-able?"

It was so difficult for me not to choke on my own saliva right then. Who asks that?

"Just my whites, Mr Schue, and a couple dresses, one pair of stilettos, a million pairs of shorts, t-shirts and tanks and some running gear my wife only wears."

He grunted again, in approval or disgust I wasn't sure.

I felt him shift slightly and I waited for his next question. It didn't come for a while so I started getting shifty and a little on edge. I don't know whether he was thinking about what to ask me or whether he was digesting everything I'd said but his silence was making me so uneasy and I was about to ask him what he was trying to tell me, when he flipped the lights back on and bounced back to his bigger green leather chair behind the desk in front of me, like he hadn't just scared the shit out of his head chef.

He stared at his linked fingers and bit his lip. He had dusty brown hair, almost like it wasn't really there, and his skin was as pale as the English sky. He was a strange man and I honestly wasn't very sure of what exactly he did. He just got a lot of money from the restaurant and liked to obviously freak all of his employees out from time to time.

When he finally looked up at me, he took a deep breath in and said just one word.

"Home."

I had honestly never been more confused in my entire life.

"...Is the name of the restaurant you own?" I finished, completely bewildered as to where he was taking this conversation and how it linked in to his 'let's turn all the lights off and think about your bedroom' shit he was playing earlier.

His eyes made no sign of recognition that I'd said anything at all. He just smiled a little and carried on.

"Home is what we all love, isn't it?"

I nodded, mainly out of fear.

"Home is the place where we can all relax and feel completely and utterly safe in. It's the one and only surrounding that can make you feel like everything will be okay. It is your rock in other words – the glue that holds everything together with its familiarity and overwhelming comfort." He paused for what seemed like dramatic effect.

(I'd never known Mr Schue to be so deep and philosophical.)

When he continued, I noticed how his eyes quickly glanced to a picture I couldn't see on his desktop, then back to me again. "Everyone needs a home and unfortunately, not everyone has one." He leaned forward and clasped his hands upon his notepad. "Because of that, I want to be one hundred percent sure that every single one of my employees has a place that they can call home. Therefore, I am appointing you as the official home of Home."

I blinked at him. "Excuse me?"

"You," He said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I want you to be the home of Home."

When I continued to just blink at him, he sighed rapidly and sat back.

"Santana," He said, wiping his fingers above his top lip. "I have appointed different positions to all my staff here across the last two weeks, ranging from the front of house, to the washrooms and to the cellar. The kitchen, the bar and the office. All spaces of this restaurant have been covered except for the most important. The home. You're probably thinking I've gone utterly mad and out of my head, but truth is, Santana, I went home the other day to find my home – my beautiful Beverly Hills home – empty and silent."

He scratched his chin and studied my reaction. He wasn't being his usual cheerful self and for that, I was kind of panicking the tiniest bit. His scratching ceased but his gaze was still focussed on me.

"I would get home from work to find my twin boys charging around their playroom, plastic swords and shields in their hands, crashing and banging and pounding in every way they knew how. My little girl would be playing the piano in the foyer and my wife would be humming softly to herself as she made jam tarts for their lunch boxes the next day. I'd turn to my left and my brother would be watching baseball in the living room and after giving my wife a kiss and my kids a quick hair ruffle, I'd always go and join him, two bottles of beer ice cold in my tired hands."

He smiled at me and I smiled back because I knew what it felt like to return back to a home like that.

"But the other day, Mrs Peirce-Lopez, I returned home to silence. There were no battles coming from the playroom. No melodies echoing through the foyer. No soft humming coming from the kitchen and every single TV in the house switched off. Except they weren't just switched off. They were gone. All of them, including my wife, my kids and my brother. All gone. You know, Santana," He said, leaning forward and twisting the ring on his wedding finger. "Never let your brother move in to your home when he hasn't got one. Because he'll always end up ruining your own."

I frowned at my boss, unsure as to what he wanted me to say or do. I kind of wanted to hug him, but our work based relationship held me back. And I hadn't hugged a man since my dad died last year.

I kept opening my mouth to say something, but all I could think was why was he telling me this?

I didn't have to think for very long.

"Santana, I want you to go home and come back tomorrow with an idea of things in your home you could not live without. And then tell me tomorrow what they are and we will get started on making this restaurant's name an actual reality. My team is a good one – I want you all to be as happy as I used to be when I walked into my home at 5.23pm every evening."

I'd left his office in a state of bewilderment. I had absolutely no idea what I couldn't live without in my home. The TV? I could just watch my wife. The kettle? I could use works. The bathtub? The ocean was on our doorstep.

I hadn't really stopped thinking about it when I got home, until I slipped my key into the lock and pushed the front door open. I thought about how Mr Schue had his five favourite things when he walked through his own and how I'd never really thought about it.

It was different every day. I didn't have any idea who would be in and who would be out.

It was only when I bit my tongue that I realised the first thing I did was call out for my wife. Why was that?

I hung up my bags by the door and dropped my keys on the kitchen side. There was silence too in this house, but I didn't think it was the same silence as Mr Schue's. This silence was sort of familiar. Sort of calming. The kind of silence you get before a storm. Except it wasn't dangerous.

I opened the fridge to search for a snack and I realised that was another thing I automatically did. Perhaps I really needed to stop that.

(You know I never will.)

I grabbed an olive from an open pack and headed outside where the living room doors were open.

I missed the faint smell of vanilla and my wife's shampoo the moment I left the house. That was another thing I hadn't realised. I loved the familiar smell of my home.

Leaning against the door frame and chewing contently on my olive, I heard several giggles coming from below the grass where the garden dips into a gentle hill and it instantly brought a smile to my face. The first head to appear was blonde and it was long and I giggled when she slipped down the hill and into the second person – my wife.

I smiled even bigger at the sight of even messier blonde hair. She looked up and her blue eyes caught mine straight away.

(You're so beautiful.)

"Baby!" She squealed, picking her mini-me up from in front of her and jogging towards me. With our daughter on her hip and her long blonde hair blowing in her face, she came to an abrupt halt in front of me and kissed me right on my lips.

(Such a good kisser.)

"Hello, you," I greeted into her lips, smiling when a smaller and pudgier hand batted into my cheek.

"And hello to you too, my lovely, darling, smelly Maggie-Moo!" Maggie giggled when my wife passed our daughter on to my hip so I could hug her. "Did you have a good day with your Mommy?"

The four year old nodded and buried her face in my neck. "We made chocolate cookies."

I opened my mouth wide, pretending I was appalled at her. "Mommy let you bake chocolate cookies? Naughty Mommy!"

Maggie giggled even more and raised her eyebrows, pointing at my wife. "I told you she'd be mad,

silly Mommy."

I grinned at them both before kissing Maggie's forehead and putting her down. She ran into the living room and started playing tug of war with our Dalmatian, Echo.

I turned to my wife as she pulled me closer to her, her hands on the small of my back.

"I missed you." She whispered, leaning down to kiss my lips.

"I missed you too," I replied, leaning forward to kiss her back and hug her. "So much."

(I really did miss you that day.)

"I made us all pasta bake for dinner." She said, into my temple, kissing the same place after. "It's all ready to go, so we can have it whenever you want, honey."

I smiled because this is what I loved so much about my wife. She was the most selfless person I had ever met and probably would ever meet for the rest of my life.

"You made a pasta bake?" I asked, holding her closer.

She simply giggled in my ear.

Brittany was what I liked to call Bubbles. She was like champagne, sometimes more the cork as it flies off the bottle than the actual drink. But ultimately, she was that very first sip and the gloriously careless way it makes you feel afterwards. She was the warmth that slipped down your throat and into your soul, kissing all your deepest and darkest corners with unadulterated invincibleness. That youthful recklessness that makes you feel like you're a teenager again. That's what she was.

That's what she is.

Britt and I like to make Jane Austen novels about the way we met – shivering in the grass of an abandoned meadow whilst it poured with rain; saved from drowning in a south coast high tide; at a high class ball, invitation only, in the centre of an eighteenth century Bath ballroom. We love to giggle at people's faces when we tell them Brittany pulled me from right under a collapsed horse's body, when the whole horse and carriage had capsized during a freak December snow storm. Or when we explain how I asked for her hand in marriage the moment we clasped eyes across a golden hemmed social room, thousands of better thought-of people surrounding us.

That last one actually comes exceedingly close to the truth. Although we were not a couple of characters who had jumped right out of a Jane Austen novel and planted straight into a twenty-first century nightclub, we may as well have been.

I like to think it was me who spotted Brittany first, but really, it was more likely her. She was the one to initiate any sort of contact to begin with.

It had been a cold and usual Friday night in February - the spring Britt turned twenty. My friend and I were home from school and had decided to spend it reminding ourselves of the reason why we left in the first place. We hadn't intended to end up at a gay bar, but at some point nearing midnight, that's where I found myself – sat on a stool in front of the bar, twirling the lime around the rim of my beer bottle, wondering whether my friend was okay in the downstairs area, stupidly allowing a gay guy to experiment with her slutty nature.

I must have looked the epitome of loneliness and if I hadn't met the love of my life at the time, I would look back in desperate shame for being so stereotypically tragic and longingly upset.

(We both know I would have probably forgotten that night altogether; it would have blurred into the

mix of other stupid and lonely nights out I had to endure.)

(Thank god for you.)

"Can I get two vodka and cokes and a glass of water please?" Was the first thing I heard Brittany say. I can't tell you why it had caught my attention so much, all I know is that I looked up and felt like someone was pulling the corners of my mouth up when I really didn't want them to.

She was tall and dressed in a short turquoise lace dress, her pink heels flattering her toned calves as she leant forward to retrieve the drinks she had ordered. I knew she felt my eyes on her because she turned to me and blushed like I'd never seen anyone blush in my entire life. Her cute and super embarrassed smile was enough to make me bite my bottom lip in an amused manner and return to twirling my lime.

I had her hook, line and sinker.

(You know I so did, baby.)

She'd stared at me for something like fourteen seconds before walking over and placing her drinks in front of her. I'd tried so hard to look at them except her face but the way she'd leant on the bar had made my own cheeks flare up like I'd had ten thousand cocktails.

Britt had asked why I was alone and she was probably the first person to actually care what my answer was. So when she told me to wait exactly where I was whilst she passed her drinks on to her work friends, I did exactly that. And when she returned, her water barely drunk and deserted on the bar top, she slipped her hand in mine and asked me to dance.

(I know now how bold it was for you to do that.)

(So brave.)

By the end of the night, we had not only our first date planned, but our second, third, fourth, fifth, first apartment, first jobs together, engagement party, wedding, baby shower, babies, more babies and our future home together.

Our future home in California, right by the ocean, the sand tickling our toes, the stars tickling our hair.

We hadn't even kissed yet.

Brittany was the kind of kid who had a destination but never ever read the map. She thought things about herself that scared her so much, she learnt to feel excited by them. She knew she was different but she wasn't desperate to find out why. Yet she was so incredibly emotional and so deeply in touch with her feelings that I often felt she really was desperate.

Like she really did want to know who she was. Who she was supposed to be.

She grew up with a single parent – a family that had been broken by death but brought together again by love. She had two younger sisters and they are the closest to Sisterhood I have ever witnessed; I dare anyone to find sisters stronger than these three. One of them, Robyn, met and fell in love with an American in The Sunshine State during her middle year at university. Brittany will tell me every day what the girl means to her and how much they have experienced together. Her youngest sister, Izzy, spends the majority of her time attending business dinners with her first love in London and although Brittany rarely Skype's her, the three of them know exactly what the other is up to.

My wife often tells me how she feels like she's the weakest one of the three of them – that her four years of being 'ill' prove that she can't handle the boulders life throws at her.

But she is so much more than that.

Britt was young when we met. She was still in her teens and although she argues every day with me that she was entirely mature for her age, it doesn't change the facts. It wasn't big; it still isn't and never was even an issue. But the four years separating the two of us always blinded me whenever something slipped up in our relationship, big or small, not because I was an adult and I knew better than her, but because she handled it the way someone with forty years of marriage experience would handle it. She just knew, naturally, how to make something she believed in work.

So after we'd eventually kissed, in the early hours of the Saturday morning under the dimming lights of a quietening nightclub and after the first, second, third, fourth and then fifth date and she was dropping me home, I should not have been as surprised as I was when my then seven-year-old daughter opened the door to us and asked her who her Mummy was spending so much time with.

The whole 'thing' we'd been doing – dating, kissing, holding hands and stealing glances – was enough to freak Brittany out in the first place. Simply talking to me in that nightclub and asking me to dance and then not running when I asked to kiss her at the end of the night gave her heart palpitations harder than any panic attack she'd previously been through.

But she looked at Clover the way she looked at her toast as she spread peanut butter on it in the mornings. Like she saw it every day and it didn't faze her in the slightest. I mean, I shouldn't have been as shocked as I was when she bent down to Clover's level and stage-whispered, "She's been spending time with me because I think your Mummy's beautiful and I really like to watch her fall over on the ice because it makes me giggle a lot. Is it okay that I steal your Mummy from you sometimes?" Because not only was she brilliant with children having been a part of her brother's growing up when her mum remarried but she had this affinity with things like this. Things like teenage depression, being a boy but feeling like a girl or having a kid when you're just sixteen.

It didn't matter to Brittany that I was only twenty-three and I had a daughter. It didn't matter that Clover was seven and I'd been so young when she was born. It didn't matter how or when or why or where. It just mattered that I was happy.

That Clove and I were both happy.

I told Britt that I'd been raped at fifteen a couple days later. She didn't push me into telling her about Clover in any way at all. I could tell she was interested and wanted to know but more strongly than that, I could see how it wasn't important to her. But when I told her how it happened and how I'd been to a friend's party with a guy I'd been 'seeing' for a few days and how he'd given me something a fifteen year old girl should never even know existed, and how he'd taken something from me that I thought for so long I could never take back, she pulled me so close to her heart that the way it beat felt more like a sacred Beethoven melody than a repeated contraction keeping her alive.

So that's why when she holds me so close like she is now, I can't help but breathe her in and hold her just as closely back.

She pulled back and left her arms slung casually round my shoulders – a hold that was just so Brittany– and looked right into my eyes, conversing with them in a way my heart would never understand. She was staring at me like I'd just asked her to marry me again.

(Maybe I'll ask you that again sometime soon.)

"You smell of garlic and smoked haddock." She giggled, biting her lip.

I rolled my eyes because she was always telling me this. "Baby, I work in a restaurant, what do you expect?"

She just giggled some more and leant forward to peck my lips before patting my butt and moving into the house. She leant down and lifted Maggie so gracefully into her arms, it left me stupidly breathless for a couple seconds, and placed her on the kitchen island.

"Mags, choose a song and we'll sing to it, ready steady go!"

I stifled a laugh at my wife's silliness, moving forward to perch next to our daughter.

"Jump, Jump, Jump!" Maggie chanted, slapping her hands on the wood.

I slapped my hands against my eyes because when my wife and youngest kid sang this song as loud as they did, nothing else could be done, mainly because they both made a point of singing it so loudly and blocking your escape routes out of the kitchen with their dancing bodies.

Britt pressed play and it was all I could do not to curl up on the floor and silently pray for it to stop.

(You know I've never been very spontaneous.)

I was about to succumb and join in when I heard the front door swing open and click shut again. Bags flopped down by the coats and running feet turned the corner into the kitchen, nearly knocking Brittany when she twirled into the entrance.

The first face to appear was the first half of our seven-year-old twins, Alaska, her shining blue eyes looking desperate to tell a story. Shortly after, Hope collided with her back running two thousand miles an hour, both of them collapsing into Brittany's side.

I waited for the tears and the pushing and the shoving and the inevitable "it was Hope's fault!", then, "No it wasn't! It was Alaska's!" But it didn't come. And it never would because Brittany is just too brilliant at making each and every one of our children feel important.

"Quick!" She gushed, placing both her arms around the two girls, "Tai will be home from school with Clove any minute now, and so we all need to hide so we can jump out at them."

"Baby, no," I protested, trying to frown despite my giggling. I took Brittany's hand and linked our fingers. "That's mean."

She kissed me quickly, producing a gagging sound from Alaska who had already hidden behind the island and then she turned to slip Maggie onto her hip. They slid behind the fridge so I clasped Hope's hand in my own and led her to the sofa where the kitchen met the living room.

"Britt, we're too old for this," I chuckled, wondering whether other thirty-eight year olds hid from their kids to scare them when they came home from school. I immediately knew the answer that no, other parents did not do this at such an old age, but when you're married to someone like Brittany, it kind of comes with the whole package.

"Hope, tell your Mom she's getting boring in her old age," Brittany's playful voice whispered from across the open room.

"Mom, you're getting boring in your old age."

"Hope!"

The next several minutes consisted of Echo annoying Alaska by licking her face, Maggie asking to get down to play with Echo and Brittany's two Australian Shepherd Dogs, Simba and Bambi nudging her crotch with their noses, waiting for their dinner.

When Clove and Tai finally walked through the door, Maggie was screaming, the dogs were howling and Hope had fallen asleep against my chest on the sofa.

"Did your plan fail again, Bee?" Clover said as she strutted in, dropping her keys on the counter.

Brittany sighed, passing Maggie over to Clover. "Your Mom over there thinks we're getting too old. Tell her to grow down."

Clover laughed, bobbing Maggie up and down, ceasing her cries. "Mom, grown down."

My jaw dropped open from my space on the sofa and I gasped, faking hurt. "Why does everyone do as their Mama says?"

"Because Mama knows best, cupcake." Brittany giggled, bending down to kiss my forehead as she moved to the pantry to retrieve the dog's dinners.

It was only after Britt had served everyone some pasta bake at the table and we'd just finished passing round the ice cream, Hope of course asking for my help because she wasn't strong enough to spoon the mixture out of the tub, that I leant back and remembered what it was I was trying to find out when I walked through the door a couple hours earlier.

I smiled slightly to myself as I watched my family eat their dinner. Clove was sat to my left, muttering something about how she needed a shower after spending all afternoon at the beach with her colleagues, explaining to Britt how it was nice to finally get away from the dressing rooms and stubborn guests that often graced their presence's on the many talk shows she worked for. I marveled at the way Brittany's eyes genuinely lit up whenever Clover spoke about her life. They always had done, ever since they first met. Brittany had always been so incredibly fascinated by all the things my daughter had to say, pointless or not.

Tai was at the head of the table, filling his eleven-year-old frame with more pasta bake than Britt and I put together. He was a strong lad – the kind of kid you'd never be worried about because he would stand up for himself. And even if something did go wrong, he'd always silently sort it, keeping the calmest of moods. He interested me so much, the little boy we adopted from Japan.

When Brittany and I had been living in California for just over a year, we decided to take a trip to the Japanese orphanages to volunteer for a couple of weeks. Originally, it was a therapeutic trip for Brittany to visit the country her father died in and try to find some peace of mind from doing so. But the moment we set foot in that orphanage, Tai's silent and calming nature captured Britt's attention to the point where she turned round to me on the final day and said, "I can't leave him. Baby, we cannot leave him."

We brought him home eight months later.

To my right sat Hope, the smaller and daintier half of the twins Brittany carried. She was staring at a slice of courgette, studying it like it was a piece of Monet. I tapped her on the nose and she giggled, pressing the courgette to my lips before I slipped it off her fork and ate it for her.

Thank you, she mouthed.

I grinned at her cheekiness. It had taken a long time for the twins to be conceived. Brittany had practically asked me one night to stop trying but all I could say back to her was, "But Britt, it's kind of nice having a struggle to get pregnant, rather than it just happening when you least want it to."

She'd held me that night when I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and made an affirmative decision to not stop trying but to start trying on her.

The twins were born nine months later in a tiny Alaskan hospital, two weeks early.

For a while, it was really hard for me to accept that the twins were even mine. Even though I had a piece of paper saying they were mine and even though one of my eggs had been artificially planted into Brittany's womb, and therefore made them mine, I still felt completely disassociated from them.

That was the roughest patch of Britt and my relationship. We'd been through tough times before, sure. But nothing could prepare me for her broken face every time I told her I wasn't getting out of bed that day.

She'd make me endless cups of coffee and tea and bake me banana bread and raspberry muffins, watching them go stale as the days went by. She'd watch movies with me fast asleep beside her, curled under the duvet three feet away. She'd run baths for me only for me to spit at her how I didn't even want one.

But it was the way she read to me every night that got me through it. I'd been through post-natal depression before, with Clover. I'd experienced the terrors, the panic attacks and the nightmares after I'd been raped. I'd been through all of that and I couldn't understand how I was going through it again, especially when I hadn't even been the one to carry the babies this time round. But Brittany read to me every single night for the twin's first three years of their lives. She'd read Alice in Wonderland, she'd read Sense and Sensibility, she'd read Pride and Prejudice and she'd read my all time favourite, Peter Pan.

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."

I remember one morning, I was lying in bed listening to the silence and thinking how I was never going to hear anything beautiful again, when I heard Brittany start tickling the twins downstairs. That quote from Peter Pan flooded straight into my mind and before I could even think about what I was doing, I was downstairs, knelt beside my wife on the living room floor, tickling Hope whilst she tickled Alaska and smiling so big at the way they both laughed so, so hard.

My wife didn't leave me during those three years and as she stood behind me that evening, her arms wrapped tightly around my middle as I cooked her favourite recipe I learnt when I was a student chef, I felt an enormous and entirely overwhelming debt that I had to make up to her.

I know that I will never make it up to her, but by asking her to help me purchase some new suits and re-write my CV, together we got me to several restaurants looking for a head chef and Home was the one I achieved. And she was never more proud of me as she was when I stood in the kitchen in my new whites, Hope on one hip and Alaska on the other. We have the picture framed on the living room wall. It's slightly blurred because Alaska never stays still for long enough.

Alaska won't stay still now.

"Popskip," I said, raising my eyebrows when the golden skinned girl turned to look at me. "Stop shifting and eat your dinner; you're making me agitated."

"But Echo wants to play, just look at him, Mom!" She gushed, pointing dramatically to the young Dalmatian as he pawed a rather annoyed Bambi. The older dog would show him whose boss. She had a way at doing that.

"You can play with Echo when you've finished your meal. Your Mama cooked it all by herself so please be grateful." I reprimanded, flicking a stray pea on the table into Alaska's face.

"Mom!"

"Santana!"

I giggled at Alaska's surprised face and sent my wife an apologetic glance. She cocked an eyebrow so I offered her a wink.

Her blush told me I had so won.

(You could never resist my winks could you, baby?)

"Have I grown down enough for you yet, honey?" I asked Britt, biting my lip.

She looked at me amusingly and continued to feed Maggie beside her.

Our youngest daughter was a miracle wrapped up in the most perfect nine months of my life in California. I'd been working at Home for about four months and it had been the busiest evening (Valentine's Day) when I finally got home at just past midnight. Britt had managed to put the twins and Tai to bed and Clove was out with her boyfriend of the time, so technically we had the night to ourselves.

"Hey gorgeous," Brittany had greeted when I walked through the door. She was just dressed in my silk robe and I couldn't help but feel incredibly turned on when she led me up the stairs and into the candle laden en suite of our bedroom.

I've never looked at the bath the same way after that night.

When we finally lay down in the king sized bed Britt had insisted we bought a couple years back, she turned to me and whispered into the evening breeze, "We're not complete."

And I said, "What?"

And she replied, "We haven't got our little blonde girl we promised one another the night we met."

"I'll carry," I'd said, without even leaving it open for discussion.

It'd been easy to fall pregnant that time. We had Britt's egg implanted within my womb and Margaret was born nine months later, aptly named after my wife's beautiful late Nanny – the woman who was the only one to believe we'd be together forever.

Maggie was a sort of sign, I suppose. A treasure to both me and Brittany. She symbolised Nanny Margaret's belief in us both and our relationship and she brought closure to a part of our lives we really struggled through but made. She's just the little blonde nutcracker who completed our perfect willy wonka upside down family.

"How was work, sweetie?" Brittany asked from across the table.

I smiled at her. "Good, thank you," and then I frowned. "A little weird actually."

"Oh?" She questioned, allowing the girls and Tai to leave the table and play with Echo. I watched them as they ran outside into the summer air and chuckled when Echo missed the ball Tai had thrown for him.

"Yeah," I breathed, facing Brittany again. "The boss just gave me some stuff to think about."

I gave her a look that said we'd talk about it later and I think Clove must have caught wind of it because she lifted Mags straight out of her chair and promptly informed her it was bath time.

We cleared the table together in silence, both of us content to just be around one another. I thought about the three years I'd spent cocooned within my duvet and how I'd practically forced my wife to temporarily leave the veterinary job she loved to take care of the kids. I realised I was so much in debt that I'd never be able to pay her back. When we were eventually finished, she took my hand and led me to the love seat beside the pool outside, pulling me down so I was relaxed on my back between her legs.

After a moments contentment to just listen to the kids running around with Echo and pausing to allow Bambi and Simba onto the loveseat with us, I said into the night air, "Baby?"

Brittany kissed my neck in acknowledgement of my question.

"I am so sorry for not being there when you really need me to be."

I felt her stiffen and drop her head over my shoulder to look at me. "Are you mad?"

I giggled. "Perhaps." But then I sobered. "But I mean, like, when the twins were born and even now. I'm always coming home and never making dinner or running baths or giving your even a smidgen of the attention you absolutely deserve."

"Sweetie," She sighed, leaning forward to turn me in her arms. Simba whined and Bambi stretched her long brown legs into my thigh. "You're making dinners all day, I definitely do not ever expect you to make dinner at home."

"But that's not the point," I argued. "I still should. I should still walk through that door at half four and I should still take the kids off your hands and give you a break. Why don't I do that?"

"Because you're tired," Was her reply.

"So are you," Was mine.

She sighed. "What did that boss of yours say to you today? Do I need to go in and rip his balls off?"

I laughed hard at that. "You wouldn't enjoy doing that, baby, let's face it."

"I would if he'd hurt you."

I smiled to myself. "He hasn't." I linked my fingers with Brittany's and chuckled silently at the way

her shorter digits looked against my long and slender ones. They were perfect. We were perfect.

"He just gave me a lot to think about."

"Okay, wait, wait, let me guess what he said," Brittany said, considerably more excitedly than I would have expected. I giggled at her youthfulness. "He said, Oh my gosh, Mrs Beautiful Dashing

Charming One-Of-a-Kind and best Chef I've ever employed Peirce-Lopez, will you divorce that wretched skanky monkey loving veterinary wife of yours and marry me instead?"

We both lay there and giggled before I said, "That's actually not far off the truth."

Brittany stopped laughing instantly and said, "What?"

I laughed even more. "Yeah, he told me he was gonna sweep me off my feet and take me to Monte Carlo where we could live on a private yacht and play poker all day long."

Brittany bit her lip in amusement. "You're such a bitch, you know that right?"

"Language, baby, the kids are around,"

She merely pecked my lips.

There was a beat, and then, "What did he really say?"

I pinched my lips together. "He said that he went home to an empty house the other day and he didn't realise what he had until it was gone." I watched as Brittany's face turned into a frown and it made my heart hurt a little. In the background, I could just about hear Clover calling in the kids and then the patio door slip closed and the early Californian buzz rose from the mumbling city below.

"He told me about everything he did when he walked through the door before – his routine and the things his family would be doing." I leant forward to kiss Britt's nose. "He asked me to think about what the word 'Home' means to me and the things I do without thinking when I walk through the door."

Brittany smiled at that. "You say, hey baby, I'm home, and I call back, hey gorgeous, we're in the kitchen." She bit her lip and glanced down at my own. "And then you take something from the

fridge to eat before giving me the best hug of my life."

I raised an eyebrow in question at her.

"It's what I wait for every day. That hug you give me when you walk through the door. It's like you haven't seen me in years or something."

"Feels like it sometimes."

"Yeah," She whispered, her lips so close to mine. "I know."

We were silent for a while, watching the sun dip behind the back of our house. The lights in each of the kid's rooms switched off one by one before we heard the shower running and Clover's soft voice floating out from within.

Brittany leant forward to kiss me and we lay there for a while, humming contently into each other's mouths. I loved kissing Britt. It reminded me of our first kiss, the way she had been so, so scared. I'd hated myself for a while after that, for making her feel that way.

I hadn't meant to be so forward. I wasn't even expecting a kiss to begin with. But people were leaving and the lights were dimming and I couldn't even hear the music in the background because the vibrations of my heart were pounding so violently in my ear. Brittany had her arms draped around my shoulders, the way she always does, and she was looking at me like she couldn't quite

believe something. Like she was confused at how confused she was feeling.

All I wanted was to take that feeling away.

I was whispers away from her lips when she looked away and bit her lip. Stealing a moment's privacy. A moment's collection. Her workmates in the background were so high on alcohol that if they did notice the two of us, all they could shout was, "Goooo, Brittany!"

I'm not sure it helped.

She'd turned back to look at me when I stepped back and her grip on my shoulder will always remain engraved in my memory. She didn't want me to move back but she also didn't want me to move forwards. She was so confused.

I remember how she'd suddenly lifted her thumb and just traced my chin, until she reached my bottom lip and studied it. Studied it like it was an exam she was going to have to complete.

I didn't want that.

So I stole a moment's bravery and I said, "Would it be alright if I kissed you?"

And her answer was her lips.

And just like this kiss now, Brittany always knew how far to take it with me. When her tongue swiped my upper lip, I let her in. When her teeth found my bottom lip, I groaned into her mouth. When her lips found my neck, I gripped her waist tighter and canted my hips into her.

That was when we stopped.

"Sweetie," She whispered against my lips, tracing her fingertips along the exposed skin on my hipbone. "Can I tell you what home means to me? And then maybe you can go into work and tell that poor boss of yours what your amazing, incredible wife said to you whilst making love under a starlit sky?"

I giggled. "But we're not even making love."

"We will be very soon, though."

I raised my eyebrows at her.

(So cute.)

And then I shook my head because I was just so in love with her.

"I can't wait for that, baby." I told her.

She smiled.

I watched her as her eyelids fluttered shut for a brief moment when she breathed in deeper than her other breaths, the corners of her lips twitching and the tip of her nose scrunching up in the gentle breeze. She was magic. Pure magic.

"Tell me," I whispered. "Tell me what Home is to you."

She smiled at me. That kind of smile that tells me she knows something I don't. All smug and loving and smitten and in love with everything. She bit her lip briefly before whispering, "Prepare yourself for a Little Brittany Sonnet, gorgeous."

I smiled. They were my absolute favourite; Brittany always had a way with words.

"Home," She begun, "Is that place between the sheets and the duvet, that place that keeps you really warm. It's waking up in the morning, knowing I'm waking up with someone else. It's the comfort of being able to reach out and find someone right there next to me. Back when I was twenty and struggling with falling in love, it was that feeling I got when the fear vanished and your arms cradled me instead. It's lying in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, listening to Hope reading Roald Dahl in the gap nestled between us. It's a happy place, yet a place where you can be sad if you really need to be. It's Tai throwing baskets with Echo out on the drive. It's that moment when I met Clover for the first time and she told me I was the prettiest Bumble Bee she'd ever seen, and I just knew that this was it – that you and me and Clover would be a family from that moment on. If I asked Alaska what she thought of when I said 'home', she'd say something like, "It's cool being at home as it makes me feel very happy and it's good to pray and to enjoy life even in hard times; even when someone's shouting at you."

I laughed at that because it could not be truer.

"And home..." Brittany whispered off, smiling. "Home is all these little feelings that add up together to make one big, beautiful feeling – and that feeling is just the most perfect and special feeling I could ever feel in my whole life."

"What little feelings are they?" I asked, nestling further to her as her fingers toyed with the hem of my t-shirt.

She giggled and hugged me closer.

"You want me to name all of them?"

I frowned. "How many are there?"

"A few." Brittany shrugged. "I'll tell you my favourites."

I kissed the corner of her mouth before she started because I'd been staring at it for a while now and

I really couldn't help it. She grinned, and began.

"One of my most favourite feelings is the one I get when I watch you cook." She smiled into my eyes. "It's like you're taken over by a whole new person, I guess? Like, you're still you, you're still the Santana I love, but you're different... it's almost as if someone's taken your heart and poured all the pixie dust from it into your food. I don't know, it's just magical. I love the way you stand behind me and guide my hands to all these different herbs and spices and make me chop so fast I'm scared our fingers will fall off. But I'm not even scared at all – not even a little bit. And just watching you

cook can bring all those feelings up for me."

She sighed deeply - something I had come to learn Brittany always did. So easily. So fluently.

"Another great feeling is seeing every single day, the way you tap your fingers against the breakfast table to Dora the Explorer as you check your emails on your phone. You don't even realise you're doing it and it's just the cutest thing. You tap it a lot harder when you're stressed but when you're happy, you seem to almost caress the table at the same time, like it's holding an ocean of secrets you can't wait to tell me later. When I hear your key in the lock and your familiar husky voice call out that you're home, I get this indescribable rush of love for you. And I think it's because I feel complete – like I finally have the best reason to smile. I know that I'm not alone because you're home. I get it at work too. I'll be chilling with the lion cubs in the orphan centre after spending three hours interacting with the public and you'll text me just to say that you dropped a fork on the floor and it will brighten my mood for the rest of the day. I'll have just done eight anaesthetics in a row and you'll send me a video message of you, and Quinn goofing off with a pile of bread dough and it will make me feel that little bit more motivated for the afternoon. I'll have helped save a baby lemur's life and I'll feel great and you'll call me and tell me you love me, almost as if you know that I've just done that. That I've just saved something's life and you're feeling proud of me. You're so intuitive like that."

I fought back a grin because everything she was telling me, I felt exactly the same for her too. There are things that my wife says to me that I cannot and probably will never be able to fathom and even begin to understand. I think back to how we were in the first few seconds of meeting one another, to the first few hours, the first few days and the first few months. We changed as separate people so much, to the point where we don't even recognise our younger selves anymore. But our relationship never changed. We have this connection that Brittany swears is the reason we're so strong. And after hearing her speak just now, I do not doubt at all that she is right.

"And there's this other thing that you do," Brittany continued, looking up to the sky, her eyes shining with bubbling amusement and excitement. She licked her lips, swallowed, and giggled into the night sky, "You've done it ever since the moment I met you, and every single time it makes my heart soar because it's just so you and it's just so perfect. But when you introduce yourself, you always bite your bottom lip, like, always! You say your name and then you just-"

She bit down hard on her bottom lip to demonstrate and then giggled like a teenager. I couldn't help but join in because it was something I was aware of but I'd never done anything about it.

"Baby, not so hard, you'll make yourself bleed." I said through my laughter, tracing the bite mark with the pad of my thumb. She pressed her lips into it and kissed my thumb so delicately, I swear butterflies could be heard flapping their wings throughout my whole body.

"Home, S..." She whispered into my thumb. "Home is you. This. Us. Our family. Like everyone always says, home is where the heart is."

"I love you, Britt."

She looked at me then, the same way she looked at me when I asked if I could kiss her that night we first met. It made me grin. I grinned even harder when she smiled so kindly and lovingly and whispered right back, "I love you too, San."

And later on, when I was cooped up beneath the sheets and the blankets in the bedroom we shared in Santa Monica, I felt for the first time in years, the way I felt when Britt told Clover she thought I was the most beautiful girl she'd ever seen. That relief and that warmth, it was so overwhelming right now. The feel of Brittany pressed into my front, her bare shoulders conversing with the early morning night air and our legs tangled up together in a way that made my whole body shiver, made me feel like I'd done it. Like I'd found what I'd always been searching for. This longing, this self-actualization my college lecturer always told me about, I was finally experiencing it right now, in a California King Bed with my beloved lady wrapped up beside me, our children asleep and dreaming around us and our dogs nestled at the door of each room, guarding them from any danger or hurt.

So I was fully prepared the next day, after I'd spent my morning brushing my teeth and making packed lunches for my perfect children with my perfect wife, when Mr Schue asked me if I thought I was up for the job of becoming the home of Home.

"Absolutely," I said, looking him straight in the eye and smiling with my teeth. "Absolutely."

Because home is that place where no matter where you wonder, time and time again, you will always, always return.

(Because home, Brittany, is just where you are.)


End file.
